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Washington experimenting with serving international cuisine for lunch

Steve Young
5:09 p.m. CDT May 7, 2014

Washington High School junior, Teresa Iraheta, who is originally from El Salvador, eats a salad and baked potato during lunch on Tuesday, May 6, 2014, at Washington High School in Sioux Falls.(Photo: Joe Ahlquist / Argus Leader)

Imagine for a moment a public school lunch menu in Sioux Falls that includes lemongrass chicken, mangos or sweet Thai chili chicken.

Sound unlikely? Then you haven't been through the lunch line at Washington High School lately.

At the urging of students in teacher Jeanne Green's English Language Learner class at Washington , the district offered international cuisine at that school twice in the past two weeks. On April 23, it produced 200 servings of sweet Thai chili chicken. Eight days later, on May 1, it served the lemongrass chicken.

"They went over very well," said Joni Davis, the district's child nutrition supervisor. "They were scraping the pans; that's kind of exciting. Everyone seemed willing to try it."

That was one of the hopes in Green's ELL composition class when her students, tasked with producing a persuasive letter to measure their progress in writing, decided to focus their efforts on something with real-life meaning to them — food.

In a district that is 30 percent minorities and includes at least 50 different languages, Green had wondered what it was like to come into a place where the meals served seemed so unfamiliar. So she encouraged her students — from Thailand and Guatemala, Eritrea, El Salvador, Sudan, Nepal and Somalia — to write Davis and inquire about the possibility of their native dishes.

That request resonated with the nutrition supervisor, who said she had been exploring that possibility for some time now. Davis' office has worked with schools in the past to create dishes on a smaller scale for cultural awareness activities. They even had mothers of students come in and help them prepare some of that food, like the sponge-like flatbread called injera that is native to eastern Africa.

But the idea of making another culture's food the main course at one of the high schools, now that was a much grander vision.

Davis came to Green's class and explained the challenges in doing that. Maybe the cost of certain exotic foods was too prohibitive. Perhaps the district didn't have the kitchen equipment needed to make a dish.

Even so, the students submitted recipes, and Davis and her staff prepared as many as two dozen samples of those foods to see if they could replicate the tastes and textures and familiarity.

"We tried to get as authentic as we could," she said. "We visited some of the restaurants in town that serve some of these foods. We went to some of the stores that sell the ingredients for some of these foods to clarify what something was if we found it on a recipe."

She then brought a dozen samples to Green's students on each of consecutive Fridays. There was yellow noodles and roasted red potatoes, steamed dumplings and stews with beef and okra and different kinds of curries.

Though sticky rice was a popular request among the students, Green said making it was too time consuming and thus prohibitive. But Davis said the district is still interested in the possibilities for rice dishes.

"Rice is something many cultures are familiar with. We looked at how many times we serve rice, and the different sauces that could make a difference and be acceptable to different cultures," she said.

Along with the chicken dishes it settled on, the district also served diced and frozen mangos. Though common in many other countries, they are only starting to show up more in Sioux Falls and are challenging for mass meal production because of the peeling and removal of pits that has to be done.

Green's students appreciated that offering, even if they were used to eating fresh mangos.

More than that, though, they were glad students who had the options of salads, pastas, Mexican fare or potato fixings still sampled and actually cleaned out all of the international offerings.

"We try this country's foods, so I think it was good that students here tried our country's foods, and tried different things," said Nadine Nkurunziza, a junior at Washington who came to America from Tanzania.

While the real purpose in all this was gauging her students' progress in writing and understanding the English language, Green thinks they learned something more.

"I'm hoping they recognize that if you go through the right channels and are polite about persuasiveness, something will happen," she said. "Instead of writing a letter and complaining, we asked for something politely, and see what happened."

Indeed, Davis said the dishes served at Washington High likely will show up next year at Lincoln and Roosevelt high schools. There could be other world foods served as well at all levels of the public school system, she said.

"We want to be listening and working with groups so we can see if there are things we can implement," Davis said. "We want to be reflective of our city and the individuals making up the community."